


Debts Paid in Full

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, M/M, Old Gods and sentient trees, cats are very important, hot weather and drought
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 11:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7843165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Death is a part of life, and the Gods believe in transactions. You cut your palm when you enter the forest; blood for safe return. You sacrifice after each hunt; bones for your sustenance. And for every life that the forest spares, another must be taken in its place: the boar got the best of you, and she got to live in your stead. You should have died – but I took that death from them. The Gods shed their blood and from it they grew the world, and all life must be sacrificed for new life to come. The trees shed their leaves to grow anew: man dies so that another generation can come in his stead.” </p><p>“But you did not let me die,” the hunter says, and it isn’t a question.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debts Paid in Full

**Author's Note:**

> Graphic violence may be something of a strong rating, but I wanted to be sure. Also, the 'witchcraft' depicted here is very much a mish-mash of various cultures and religious practises, the intention was not to make something representative of any one craft or practise.

August is a rich month, a solitary month, a month made for change.

Up in the forests that embrace the foothills of the mountain, everything feels transitional, liminal. In the morning you wake to clear skies and the sort of cool air that feels heavy with the knowledge of heat to come, but by afternoon that soft and hazy blue has bled to black storm clouds that crack and break over the mountains with a deafening roar, brief but torrential showers of rain falling only for a moment or two. The air might feel clear again afterwards, but the earth cracks from heat only hours later, the rainwater already disappearing from the earth. The storms have cleared the air for golden evenings, but by nightfall everything is hot again, heavy.

It is ever moving, ever changing. August brings everything to focus: all that builds in the spring and the cooler summer months that come before suddenly bursts into a fever; hot nights, sweating beneath sheets, limbs so heavy that you might be tricked into thinking that a curse had been laid on them.

The villagers know about curses: whispers move slowly in hot nights like these, but they get around, just the same.

Deep in the woods, the stagnant pools left from the mountain run-off attract swarms of flies, grow slick with algae, decay. Even the animals avoid them, for they smell like death. The streams from the mountain have dried up over the summer: the storms do not replenish them, only send waves of water and mud down the slopes to the villages, hitting their wooden boundary walls, soaking the earth of the forest for just a few hours.

Outside the forest, the villages are emptier that they are at any other time of the year, the able-bodied going to the far off cities and bigger towns to work as labourers, as mill workers, as anything they can find that might earn them enough coin to make it through the winters (the winters in the mountains are as cold as they are treacherous, for the land has not forgiven man for using his hand to shape them to his whim) and good coin is always needed for sacks of food, for haunches of meat, for firewood and coal.

Cold iron, too.

There are wolves in the forest, and wolves grow hungry when snow starts to fall.

The villagers do not trust the wood. The cities may have adopted new Gods, but out here they worship the open mouths and staring eyes of the old ones. They are the Gods of dark forests and deep rivers and soaring mountains, of wolf teeth and owl wings and the anger of the wind. They are always hungry, always to be feared. The men know to burn the bones of their catches, wrapped in fat, in honour of them, and they know to cut their palms and smear the blood on the rock at the end of the path that leads into the trees, to make sure they can find their way out again. They wouldn’t go in at all if they didn’t need to hunt the small deer, the swift hares, the fat birds that linger between the trees.

The shadows between the oak trees are dark, and dangerous.

They do not go in there at all if they cannot help it.

They know that to do so is to run the risk of harm. It is easy to get lost; the animals will turn on them if they can; the Gods have always been angry.

And there is a witch in the wood.

 

* * *

 

 

Well, there isn’t really, not if you were to ask Bilbo Baggins, alone in his solitary cottage with its neat vegetable patch and sturdy walls.  Sure, he leaves mint by the windows to keep away the corpse flies, and yes, he rests the marsh stones, glittering with their deep hidden quartz, around the boundary of his little estate, and perhaps, now and again, his mind might slip into something else’s, but witch?

He wouldn’t choose to describe himself as such.

He is the last of the forest folk, the last of the men who know the way of the earth, the last who can hear the song of the trees. He was taught to do it by his parents, and he knows that one day he will have to teach it to someone else if he doesn’t want it to die off with him.

The wood feels the closest to death as it ever does in August. In spring, everything is pushing through new earth, fresh rain feeding that which is slowly waking, and in the winter, though everything is still he can feel the potential sleeping beneath the earth, can feel it changing, embryonic as the snow leaves glittering traces between the trees. In early summer, the warmth makes everything bloom. Even in autumn, when everything is folding in on itself, there is movement, the knowledge that the forest is just making way for the new.

But August is death. The mudslides pull the living plants from the dry earth, the flowers wilt from the baking heat, the sweat on his brow as he goes about his daily tasks makes him feel as though his end is coming. Animals die in the winter, but it is an ordinary thing – the cold and the hunger needs to take its share every year: frost and famine are as natural as breathing. The disease that spreads in the humidity of August, the dehydration that saps the strength from them, the poison that breeds in the standing water – none of them ever feel right to Bilbo.

When he places his hands to the earth now, he feels the death that he is expecting, and something more.

It happens, sometimes.

The men fear the woods, but they come into it anyway.

He slings his old leather bag around his shoulders, and rubs his cat behind the ears. She is a crotchety old thing, spry despite her age, more wildcat than any domesticated breed, and she looks at him knowingly with eyes the colour of bright skies burning through spring leaves before turning back in the direction of the _feeling._

She senses it too, he can tell. He has never questioned how she knows as much as she does. He had buried his mother’s body in the roots of her favourite sycamore at the height of the full moon, and on the day the last sliver of it disappeared the cat had arrived, sat on his doorstep, her eyes closed and her face pointed to the starlight falling between the leaves of the tree.

He doesn’t want to question it.

He doesn’t want to know the answer.

“I know,” he says, with a sigh. “I’ll be home soon.”

It doesn’t take him long to find the hunter: he has wandered far deeper than the others normally do, and Bilbo can only think that he must have been lost to dare to come this far into the forest which none of them trust. He has a large knife tucked into his belt that he never got to draw, a broken bow on the ground of the clearing nearby a solid indication of why he had been in the woods in the first place. His hair is long and dark and pulled back from a face that might have been cut from a mountain, and he had pulled himself to the roots of an oak tree to prop himself up in his final moments, his hands pressing against a gaping wound in his stomach, the result of, Bilbo would guess, an unfortunate incident with a boar.

He sighs again, quietly, in deference to the forest.

He has done this hundreds of times over his life. Hunting is dangerous business – the forest does not like to have its animals taken by any hand other than its own, and it has given its beasts many ways to protect themselves. He knows what to do: he remembers the movement of his mother’s hands as she did the exact same things. Opal from the stone bag, to give him the boost well needed in times when the forest does not feed him enough energy; a lock of the hunter’s hair, taken gently and made into a shamble with the leaves stained with his blood around them, a gift to the forest, to take this hair instead of his soul so that it might move on to another life. Cat’s Eye, tucked into his closed fist, to protect the body from any other wandering spirits that might take interest in it before the village people find their missing friend.

Some months later he will come back to the place, and if no one has come to retrieve his body he will collect the bones and bury them himself, wrapped in nothing but the flowers that have sprung from the earth that his flesh has disintegrated into.

He kneels at the man’s side: this glade is normally mossy, but the deep summer and forced it back, and now the ground feels dry and uncomfortable beneath his knees. He has never enjoyed this part of his role, but he knows its necessity, and he does not wince when he pulls the man’s hand from the wound in his stomach, the hand with the cut that he must have made himself, to find his way home.

The sight of the blood doesn’t make him start.

Neither does the smell of flesh, already putrefying in the heat.

What does is the man’s sudden groan.

Bilbo’s eyes are wide, and his hands are still holding the man’s: it takes him a moment to seek out his pulse, and when he does he is forced to close his eyes for a moment. It is slow, and unsteady, and the feeling of death is still pouring off him, but he is not quite dead yet.

He must be strong: he has lost a lot of blood.

Bilbo knows what he is supposed to do now: his bag has herbs for pain, plants that would let him slip from this life, away from an injury that Bilbo has no way of curing without doing things that he knows he should not: he has done it countless times with animals, with deer with shattered legs and rabbits whose skulls have been half-caved in. When the man is gone he can ward the body and protect the spirit from the forest’s hunger, and go on his way again, leaving the body for the villagers or for slow decay, whichever takes him first.

But he has never found a live man before.

He has never done this to another human – and it is different, for no matter what the villagers call him, he is still human too.

His hands move to his stone bag, as it should, but he doesn’t pull out the Cat’s Eye – no, he leaves that where it is. Bloodstone first, for the hunter has lost a lot of blood, and he is very pale; hematite for infection; tigerstone for health. Calendula from his herb bag for the wounds, comfrey and skullcap for the pain, valerian to calm his own nerves, for he knows that his plants and stones will not be enough. He will need to do more.

And then he clenches his fists, and sets to work doing what he should not.

 

* * *

 

 

The sun has almost set by the time that he has done, and his hands are thick with blood. His back is aching, and soaked in sweat, and the man’s skin is still pale, but perhaps less so than before. He sweats with fever, but his heart, Bilbo hopes, will continue to beat, and soon he will push it out.

Bilbo is tired, the sort of deep, aching exhaustion that he knows will haunt him for some days. It is hard to heal anything when the injuries are so severe, but that is not what has destroyed his energy today: it took more of himself than he expected to bring the spirit of the man back from the brink. The hunter’s thick black hair is streaked with silver now, and Bilbo knows that’s because it took too much out of him, that he went too far. But the man’s stomach is no longer gaping open, is instead a mess of barely healed skin, ugly, but no longer bleeding.

“Get up,” he whispers into the man’s ear, and he sees a flicker of movement around his jawline. The hunter's eyes open, and they stare up at Bilbo with confusion.

“Where am I?” he asks, and then his forehead creases as he focuses. “Who are you?”

“My name is Bilbo,” he replied, glancing around them, for a sudden wind has stirred the still day, and it is sending a chill up his sweat-soaked tunic. There is a roaring in his ears that he knows the hunter will not be able to hear: a fury at a spirit denied.

“We should go,” he says, quickly. “Can you stand?”

He feels a little sick, to see what he has done, but the hunter nods, and with Bilbo’s hand makes it to his feet. The forest groans around them, and Bilbo winces at the sound despite himself: it is due its death, and he has claimed it back from the jaws today. It will not forgive him for that very easily. Amber for protection, he thinks to himself, as he reaches for a piece of it to hold in his hand: he isn’t sure if he will need it, for he doesn’t know what a creature like this is capable of, but it gives him some comfort to have it none the less.

The man is slow in his movements, and he stumbles from time to time, as if he does not know how best to move his body: he is frowning as he follows Bilbo, his eyes a little glazed, too much in shock to question where he is being led.

“I am sorry,” Bilbo whispers, and he doesn’t know if it is to himself, to the man, or to the trees.

The cat stares at him when the two of them arrive back at the cottage, and then she disappears into the dried out undergrowth, with what Bilbo can only describe as a judgemental flick of her tail.

“I know,” Bilbo says to no one.

 

* * *

 

 

He knows why his mother told him never to bring a living body back.

He makes up a bed in an alcove, and tells the man to sleep. He lies down without question, for he is close to collapse from the short walk alone: no doubt when he wakes he will have more questions, but for now his brush with death has left him too exhausted for anything else. Bilbo wonders, for a moment, what his name is, but he supposes he will have time to discover that when the man wakes again.

The forest is still screaming outside the protection of his cottage.

His wards will only last so long if he ignores them: he suspects that a conversation will have to be had.

He mixes dried borage and bay leaves and celandine and burns them together, breathing the smoke deep into his lungs, remembering his mother’s words cautioning him not to do what he had done. He cleanses amethyst next, and ties it around his throat, to keep it close to his skin.

He didn’t heed her warning, and now he is going to have to undo what he has done.

Bilbo goes back into the forest that day, for despite the slick of sweat that sticks to him uncomfortably he knows that he cannot afford to waste the last couple of hours of light that he has left. The trees know he has done wrong: they lean over him threateningly, and he resists the urge to pull the juniper from his bag, to wrap it around his forehead in a crown of thorns to save him from a punishment that he knows is coming.

He cannot avoid it.

This is why he was never supposed to bring the living back.

The forest gets what the forest is owed.

He breathes in deep, and tastes death.

It has not left the air.

There is a pull in his chest, one that he has only ever felt a couple of times in his life before, taking him through the wood to a place that he would rather not go: once, when he was a child, and there was wisdom to be imparted to him that could only come from something greater than him; again, when he was finally an orphan, and the last one left to hear what they had to say.

The flies swarm around him, landing on him, drinking his sweat. He knows there is no point trying to bat them off, so he gives in, and lets them take their fill. It doesn’t matter where he walks, for he knows that he will end up in the same place despite it, so he merely grits his teeth as the path grows steeper, the ground crumbling underfoot to make his way all the harder. The Gods have never made anything easy, and when he reaches the thick tangle of branches that covers the old shrine he swallows, hard, and steps closer.

“I’ve come,” he says, knowing that it is redundant.

The Gods know.

The voice that comes from the thicket is one heavy and thick with blood, and though Bilbo sees nothing he knows that there are teeth in that voice, sharp things, waiting to hurt.

He has stolen something from the forest.

The forest will demand retribution.

“Blood for blood,” the voice says, and Bilbo nods, and steps closer.

A hand stretches from the branches: it is thin, and pale, and sickly, but Bilbo knows that appearances are deceptive. There is a strength in it that he could never match, one that makes him feel sick when it reaches him, when those fingers touch his skin, hot and unpleasant: the skin is dry, as dry as the forest and the earth that cracks under Bilbo’s feet when he walks, and he knows with a clarity that he cannot explain that is because the – whatever it is – behind the thicket is the embodiment of the forest. In winter it is cold but flush with the blood of deep movement, of life; in autumn it is fat from the harvest and dark from the dying light; in spring it bleeds from all the life bursting from it: in August it is as close to death as it will ever be.

“You owe us a debt,” the voice tells him, and for a split second Bilbo wonders what he would see if he pushed closer, if he peered through that tangle of branches to what lay beyond – if that arm ever met a shoulder, if that voice came from an actual mouth or a yawning maw of teeth, if he would ever be the same again after learning.

“And I will pay it,” he says, with more confidence than he feels.

“You do not have the strength,” the voice replies, immediately, and there are thorns in it.

“Perhaps,” Bilbo answers, repressing a shudder as the hand caresses his cheek. “But that does not mean that I cannot try.”

The voice is silent, for quite some time, though the nails on the hand are pressing harder into his skin.

“You chose a man over the forest,” the voice says, in the end, and for a moment Bilbo thinks that it almost sounds afraid: perhaps it knows that it needs Bilbo, as much as Bilbo needs it, and it is scared of the shift in power, that its one human servant might change his allegiance to the living. He shouldn’t have thought it: he winces as the nails draw blood.

“I could not let him die,” Bilbo replies. “For what it is worth, I am sorry that I took the life from you, but when I looked at him, I could not bring myself to leave him.”

He hears breathing from behind the branches, and he closes his eyes.

“Until the month is done, then,” the voice says, and though it is angry still it sounds as though it has been tempered, just a little, though Bilbo does not know by what. "Or I will take the life back, no matter what you have done to save it."

The hand withdraws: he resists the urge to wipe the blood from his cheek.

Nothing more needs to be said. He turns, and he leaves, and it is hours before he finds the cottage again. He finds a dead hare on his walk, already being attacked by flies, and he saves the soul of it before letting the forest take the death as its own. It does not make up for what has been done. He doesn’t know what will, but that is a problem for another day. For now, he has a man without a name waiting for him, and many books collected by his parents that may hold an answer.

The cat is back and waiting for him on the porch. He scratches her ears before they make their way inside, where the man is still sleeping. Bilbo suspects that it will be days before he wakes.

Death takes it out of everyone.

 

* * *

 

 

He is correct in his guess: three times the moon has risen and set again before the hunter wakes, slowly and with low groans, rubbing at his eyes, giving Bilbo enough time to nudge the cat out his door (her eyes, he knows, can be disconcerting) and pad over to the small bed.

“Can you hear me?” he asks, quietly, and the hunter nods, before his eyes open suddenly.

“Who are you?” he barks, his eyes flying wildly around the room: it should not be surprising that he does not remember the day that he nearly died, and Bilbo tries to smile as comfortingly as he can, though he knows he is not very good at it.

“My name is Bilbo,” he says, trying for gentle. “I found you in the forest three days ago, and I have healed you.”

The hunter’s hands fly to his stomach, pulling at his clothes, his eyes widening as he sees the new flesh, the pink ridges of scar tissue, the evidence of a healing that is not as natural as he knows. His eyes, when he turns them back to Bilbo’s, are afraid.

“You’re the witch,” he whispers, and Bilbo is glad that he took the knife from his belt whilst he slept. “What do you want from me?”

_The witch will steal your soul from you in the night, will use your body for their wicked ways. The witch will eat your eyes, will enslave your body, will drain your blood and feed their familiars with it. The witch will destroy you. The witch is evil. You must never trust a witch._

Bilbo has heard it all before, whispered between hunters on the rare occasions that his cloaked figure is spotted between the trees.

“I don’t want anything,” Bilbo says, quietly. “I am afraid that I cannot let you leave yet – you can try, but the forest will take you for its own the moment you leave my boundaries. As soon as I solve my problem, you can return to your home, and with my good graces.”

The hunter does not trust him.

Bilbo doesn’t blame him, but it does annoy him. He has never done anything to any of these people, yet still the stories circulate. He does not feel that he deserves them, but then again, he knows that deserve does not reflect what you are given. Such things are beyond his choices.

“What do you mean?” the hunter asks, in the end, his eyes narrowed, and Bilbo sighs. It is to be expected that the man would not understand.

“You were dying,” he replies, in the end, and the hunter nods, slowly.

“It was a boar,” he says, more to himself than to Bilbo. “A mother, I surprised her. I… I thought I had died. I remember the pain, and closing my eyes, and…”

“You came very close,” Bilbo cuts in, when the man’s eyes begin to mist with the fear of his memory. “It took a great deal to bring you back. You should have died, in fact – though I suspect that you are glad that you did not. The forest, however, is owed a life in return, for me having saved yours, and until I have paid that debt I fear that it will simply take yours, to fill the void.”

The hunter is confused, but he is leaning back into his pillows a little, calmer, perhaps. It might be because he is listening to Bilbo, but it is more likely due to the chamomile he is burning in the incense burner.

“I don’t understand,” he whispers, and this time Bilbo’s smile is a little more genuine.

He is not a witch, but all life is magic, and he knows more about it than most.

“I know you do not, my dear,” he says, settling down, his voice quiet too. “Death is a part of life, and the Gods believe in transactions. You cut your palm when you enter the forest; blood for safe return. You sacrifice after each hunt; bones for your sustenance. And for every life that the forest spares, another must be taken in its place: the boar got the best of you, and she got to live in your stead. You should have died – but I took that death from them. The Gods shed their blood and from it they grew the world, and all life must be sacrificed for new life to come. The trees shed their leaves to grow anew: man dies so that another generation can come in his stead.”

“But you did not let me die,” the hunter says, and it isn’t a question.

Bilbo shakes his head.

“I did not. And the forest knows that it is owed a debt, and I will pay it, in time.”

“How?” he asks, but Bilbo does not answer – he doesn’t know how.

“Sleep,” he tells him, instead, and the hunter nods, his eyes already falling lower. But he reaches out, even as he slumps down in his bed, and grabs hold of Bilbo’s wrist, holding tight for just a moment.

“Witch,” he whispers, and his voice is kindly. “You have my thanks, and my name: Thorin.”

 

* * *

 

 

The men do not give their names easily: Bilbo knows this. They believe that names have power, and maybe they do, for when you know a name you are one step closer to their soul – though Bilbo supposes that he could not be much closer than he already is, for he has already pulled it back from the Gates, has already felt the cool slither of it move through his fingers as he ushered it back to where it was supposed to be.

But the man did not know that, and he gave Bilbo his name none the less.

Thorin.

It is a good name, he decides, as the forest moves around him the next morning. A strong name.

The leaves whisper as he thinks that, judging him.

Thorin is awake again by the time he gets home, staring intently at the cat, who is blinking slowly. Bilbo is cautious as he moves through the door, but Thorin doesn’t even seem to notice, too focused on the cat who, as Bilbo has suspected, is proving that she is more than an ordinary cat. In fact, both of them only seem to register his presence when he is steeping tea for the two of them, at which point the cat seems to stare at him judgmentally until he pulls the jar of honey he has harvested from the wild bees to sweeten the cups.

“Yes, yes,” he says, with a roll of his eyes.

His mother had always insisted on honey in her tea.

He hands the cup to Thorin, who has started probing at his stomach again now that the cat has moved on. He sniffs a little when Bilbo sits on the ground beside him, and watches him carefully out of the corner of his eye.

“You are not what I expected,” he says, eventually, and Bilbo hides a smile in the steam from his cup.

“I get that a lot,” he replies, and Thorin blinks.

“Really?”

Bilbo stops himself from rolling his eyes, but only just.

“No,” is his answer. “Strangely, I don’t get many visitors.”

Thorin looks away, at that.

“The stories paint you in quite a different picture to the one that you and your… cat have given me,” he says, after a long moment of silence that does not quite manage to be awkward, although Bilbo rather thinks that it should be. “I am sorry, I suppose, for jumping to conclusions about you. And thank you, again – for saving my life.”

Bilbo smiles, just a little.

“You might not want to thank me until I have secured it, and you can leave again.”

Thorin nods, slowly, and his gaze darts to the cat.

“She was telling me about it,” he says, a little hesitantly, and Bilbo glances at her, his mouth pulling into a tight line. She normally only speaks to him, and even then, only in blinks and movements that he has come to know so well. Rarely does she project her voice into the mind of another, and he knows that it wears her greatly to do so, particularly at times such as these, when the energy from the forest is at its weakest. She must have thought it of great importance, to do so.

She returns his gaze, unblinking for a moment, before she turns away and pads for a moment, finally curling herself up on the floor to sleep in the puddle of golden light that is spilling through the window.

Bilbo finishes his tea; Thorin hasn’t touched his, but Bilbo isn’t offended.

“Drink that,” he tells him, standing again. “It’s good for you, and when you’re done, I’ll show you outside.”

Thorin quirks an eyebrow at that, obviously remembering Bilbo’s warning, but he drains the tea anyway as Bilbo stands, stretching, waiting patiently for Thorin to be done. Bilbo has to keep an arm around him to stop his weak legs from stumbling, but soon enough they have got him to the door – it is harder now than it was the day that he had found him, Thorin’s limbs feeling heavier and less responsive, but they make it none the less.

Thorin’s mouth drops open when Bilbo opens the door.

Bilbo leads him outside slowly, taking him to the bench where he sits sometimes. His small cottage is settled into a small hillock in a glade in the forest, and around them the trees have been cleared enough to give space enough for a small vegetable patch, and a much larger herb garden. The trees press close to the wooden wall that his grandfather had built with his own hands, but they do not come past it, cannot, for the wards are set deep in the earth, and he makes them stronger with each passing year.

“And you are certain that I cannot leave?” he asks, as Bilbo expects him to. He shakes his head, and when he turns to look at Thorin his eyes are apologetic.

“I would ask you not to,” he replies, and Thorin nods, though he is frowning again.

“The cat… she said the same. And it is not that I do not trust the two of you, but you have to understand why I struggle to believe you.”

He expected that, too, and simply continues to steer him towards the boundary of his land, where he knows Thorin’s eye will be caught by the safest thing that Bilbo can think of to convince him – and, thankfully, he is not disappointed.

“What is that?” Thorin asks, as they reach the bench, close to that wall. Set into the wood are the gemstones that strengthen it, each one found and chosen from the mountains, to make their own haven amongst the oaks and shadows that seem to move even when everything is entirely still.

Bilbo does not say anything: he merely smiles, and nods when Thorin reaches out to touch them. He isn’t sure if they will work on a man from the village, but he sees no harm in trying, and when Thorin’s eyes widen he knows that he did not need to worry.

The magic has seeped into him: were Thorin to look down he would see a play of gold across his fingers from where he touched the wall, but he does not, and Bilbo cannot blame him for that – a whole new world has opened up before him.

Thorin doesn’t need to explain what he sees: it is what Bilbo sees every time he focuses on the forest. The boundary glows with a gold that comes from comfort and protection: the stronger the bond within it, the brighter the light. When Bilbo lived here with its parents, it stayed brighter for far longer: back then, it had only needed reinforcing every ten years or so, but living by himself makes it much harder to maintain. He is glad that today it seems brighter than it has done recently, though he doesn’t know why: the golden light catches in the thick grass between the growing plots, the flowers, the flurry of movement from the bees, even the trees beyond. And around those trees is the twisting silver flicker of their own life, each leaf lit up in bronze veins even at this time of year: but a few weeks earlier and the lights would have been a thousand colours in the undergrowth, but though the wildflowers are dead now Bilbo must still admit that it is a sight worth beholding.

“I did not know that the forest could be this beautiful,” Thorin says, under his breath, and Bilbo squeezes his arm, without quite meaning to, getting him finally to the bench, and pushing him down. The sight will last a few minutes longer, and he wants Thorin sitting for what he must show him next.

“Look out there,” he says, quietly, pointing into the forest. He saw the creature when they first left the door, but he knows that Thorin will only just have been able to see it: a tall stag, bone white but for the blood pouring from its antlers, which are far taller than they should be and glittering like quartz: it watches them with diamond eyes (beautiful, hard, glittering) that are not mortal, not in any way, and its breath mists before it despite the heavy heat of the day.

Its eyes are fixed on the two of them: it stands taller than either of them, and there is no doubt in Bilbo’s mind where it came from, or what it is here to achieve.

“What is that?” Thorin breathes, stilling.

“The Gods take different forms to watch us,” Bilbo tells him. “This is why you cannot leave, for it is waiting for you.”

Thorin swallows, but to Bilbo’s surprise he does not look away.

“It is a fearful thing,” he admits, his eyes roving over the antlers of the beast, which are catching the light, refracting it around the dark shadows beneath the trees. “But beautiful still, I think, though I would not wish to get any closer to it. To see such a thing… I did not think that I ever would.”

His voice is reverential: his hand finds Bilbo’s which he realises only now is still wrapped around Thorin’s arm, and he does not pull away as Thorin’s fingers squeeze his.

“All life is beauty and terror in equal measure,” he tells him, and then Thorin’s eyes are turning from the forest around them, and are watching him, deep and grey-blue and full of some strange sort of curiosity, one that Bilbo does not have a name for.

“You cannot leave this place,” Bilbo whispers to him, gently, a small part of him afraid that Thorin will protest still.

But he does not.

He simply nods, and his eyes do not leave Bilbo’s face for a very long time.

 

* * *

 

 

Bilbo does not trust the heat, does not trust the disease in the air: he sits Thorin down on the tall stool by the window and makes him remove his tunic – it is torn and filthy anyway, and Bilbo wonders if he has anything stored away that will fit him.

Maybe his father’s. He kept them for the fabric, but they’ll do at a pinch for Thorin. Wide enough, yes, though they’ll be a little short.

That doesn’t really matter.

Thorin seems to be taking everything in with much more careful eyes now: his gaze falls on the beeswax candles, the shelves of old books, the homemade quilts thrown over the old but serviceable furniture, the bushels of dried plants hanging from the low rafters. The cat is still sleeping, Bilbo thinks, as his hands trace the contours of Thorin’s stomach gently, feeling for scar tissue healing ill, for the warmth of infection, for the dampness of pus, before he wraps Thorin’s stomach in poultices and prays that it is enough to keep the infection from the new skin, from the barely healed wound.

“That feels good,” Thorin says, quietly, as Bilbo smooths the last of the bandages, and Bilbo frowns.

“Did it hurt before?” he asks, and Thorin’s eyes widen a little, before he shakes his head.

“No,” he mutters, looking away. “Not particularly.”

Bilbo is frowning, unsure of what Thorin means, when he realises his hands are still running gently over the bandages around his sides, and he withdraws, quickly, to make tea. There are many plants to stave off infection, and he wants to get as many of them into Thorin as he can before he crashes out again. The cat stretches, and seems to shake her head at him before padding over to the window next to Thorin, pulling herself up and staring into his eyes.

He wonders if she is speaking to him, and if she is, what she is saying.

It has been many years since he has had a visitor in the cottage – in fact, he doesn’t think that anyone has been here since before his mother died and the Pilgrim last came to bend his knee to her in thanks for what she did.

He isn’t entirely sure what to do. He doesn’t know if he can talk without blurting out his fear over what to do next: he doesn’t want to worry Thorin any more than he can, doesn’t want him to end up feeling guilty that Bilbo saved his life for this.

He goes about his normal tasks for the next week: he tries to think of things to offer the God, but can’t come up with anything. Instead he helps the animals in the forest as he always does, and he is glad that no more hunters find themselves dead between the trees, because he isn’t sure if he can cope with the feeling of recrimination that he knows will drown him if he has to press stones into dead men’s hands right now. It is harder than it has ever been, doing his work at the moment, and it makes him feel worse that coming home and finding Thorin actually makes him feel _better._

It is obvious that Thorin is bored for lack of things to do: he is always still sleeping when Bilbo leaves with the dawn, and he suspects that Thorin stays sleeping until the middle of the day, still exhausted from the process of healing. But after that, he feels the need to do things around the house: he doesn’t push the boundaries of the cottage, has learned and understood that he cannot, but Bilbo often comes back to find that his bookshelves have been reorganised, his floors cleaned, the pile of wind-fall branches piled by the outside wall have been chopped into small pieces with the old, blunt axe – which is in fact, no longer blunt, because Thorin has sharpened that as well, as he managed to find the old whet stone that Bilbo had lost several years back. When the dusk falls, though, and he comes home, Thorin is never doing any of those things. He’s always standing at the wall, his hand pressed against the stones, his eyes fixed on the stag.

Bilbo has never feared the forest, but Thorin doesn’t understand that. He squints, unimpressed, every time he catches sight of Bilbo’s belt, empty of weaponry.

“If you bring blades into the forest, then the forest will see you as a threat,” Bilbo explains eventually, patiently, when Thorin finally says something about it, for though he has known this his whole life he is also aware that this goes against everything that the villagers believe. “If you walk between the trees with nothing to harm, then you may do so with no fear. The beasts will not harm you if they do not believe that you will harm them first.”

“I did not have a weapon drawn when I stumbled into the mother boar, with her children,” Thorin protests, and Bilbo sighs, internally. It is dark outside, but the candlelight keeps the cottage in a warm glow, and makes everything seem very close, intimate. Thorin is leaning close, because Bilbo is talking quietly (too used to years of whispering only to himself), and there is a small scar beneath his eyes which Bilbo has only just noticed. He doesn’t know why he keeps touching Thorin, only that he can’t stop himself from doing so.

“A beast might not attack us, but what if sheer chance should leave us in such a situation? We must have means of protecting ourselves.” Thorin’s voice is insistent and Bilbo shifts closer, despite himself. He doesn’t quite know the right words, and is struggling to find them, and Thorin’s gaze is distracting. There is magic in man, too, he is coming to realise – not the same sort as in the forest, where life flows like liquid silver: it is something stronger, something fiercer, something hot and feverous and solid that has wedged in the back of his throat so that he almost feels as though he is choking from it.

In the end, Bilbo shakes his head, and gently presses another scar on the back of Thorin’s hand with his fingers without even quite meaning too, another on his wrist, a third on his forearm.

“You must trust in the woods not to steer you wrong,” he tells him, and when he glances up Thorin is frowning again, not disbelieving, but not quite believing yet, either.

“I do not trust the woods,” Thorin admits, eventually. “They have done me no service to let me do so: they have taken from me, and I cannot forget it.”

“They have given to you, too,” Bilbo reminds him, wondering how many kills Thorin has taken home to feed his family – the mother he speaks of with respect, the sister who fills his voice with pride, the nephews that inspire such love in him that he almost lights up with it. He doesn’t think anyone would know, not even Thorin, but if the forest has taken from him it has handed back too, in herbs and roots and rabbit and deer and wood to sustain them through the winter.

Everything is a cycle.

Thorin perhaps understands that better than he can understand trust: Bilbo suspects that he relies on many things that he does not trust: the weather, traders, the strength of the village walls, the eternal life that a child will always believe that their mother has. The forest, and the Gods: they are another extension of that. That is why men return, and why they always cut their palms and press blood to the rocks for safe travels, no matter how many times they have made it home before.

“You have so many scars,” he says, for lack of anything else to say, and Thorin nods.

“And you have so few,” comes his reply. “Though I would warrant a few more, beneath the surface, that you do not allow others to see.”

The cat purrs, from the windowsill.

The night outside is still, the air hot. There is sweat beading on Bilbo’s upper lip, and for a moment he forgets the God outside, inconsolable, at the sensation.

 

* * *

 

The stag steps closer as each day passes.

Its eyes turn from white to red; diamond to garnet.

He can hear its voice in his head at night now.

Blood will have blood.

 

* * *

 

 

Bilbo tries, oh he tries. He asks the wise old soul of the hill and the mother of trees for guidance, but neither of them tell him anything other than that which he already knows. As the days pass by and he grows more and more used to Thorin being in his home those words seem to grow only louder in his mind, pealing like the funeral bells that he hears from the village sometimes as he tries to sleep: _you cannot take what you are not willing to give._

The bed under the stairs is not a comfortable arrangement for Thorin, but Bilbo does not mind sharing his, not when it is far too big for one and easy enough to divide without awkwardness on his part (and if Thorin feels any, then he does not say so). He finds he sleeps easier now listening to the sound of Thorin’s breathing, though it still takes him far longer than he should. He blames the additional heat of another body in bed in this weather, but he knows that is a lie.

“I have some gold, in the village,” Thorin proffers, after another day in which no solutions to their plight have been unearthed. “From tools that I have made and traded, saved up for a rainy day.”

They both glance outside, where the bitter heat still reigns.

“An expression,” he adds, at Bilbo’s confusion. “How much gold would I need for a life?”

Bilbo smiles, and pats Thorin’s hand.

“What would the forest need gold for?” he asks, softly. “It is a good thought, Thorin, but its worth here is not the same as it is in your world. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen more than a gold coin here, and they were dropped by hunters.”

Thorin takes this news well, and Bilbo thinks that he expected it.

They have not said anything about the fact that they sit now, pressed thigh to thigh, as Bilbo reads his old books written in tongues lost to man and Thorin closes his eyes, trying hard not to still feel tired. They drink tea together, and sometimes, when Thorin’s arms ache too much, Bilbo will brush his hair for him, Thorin sat on the ground between Bilbo’s knees and everything feeling almost uncomfortably domestic, more so than Bilbo thinks it should. It scares him, and at the same time, it doesn’t. If it wasn’t for the deadline hanging over them, he rather thinks that it would be perfect. His arms hurt less and less as the days pass - everything hurts less and less, in fact, and Bilbo does not question why the frequency of Thorin's requests do not change.

As it is, time is stretched in that terrible way that means that whilst you feel with a certainty that it has lasted forever, you cannot forget that it is coming to an end.

Like August is, and it is, though Thorin questions Bilbo when he says that, for he can’t feel it: it is like a rumble of distant thunder, an increased heat and pressure that tells him that soon the dismal weather will break, that the earth will be sated again. Thorin cannot hear the sounds of the earth, but Bilbo describes them to him, and sometimes when he does Thorin watches him with a strange kind of wonder, as if he does not know what to make of him.

“We thought you monstrous,” Thorin whispers to him once, on one particularly hot night when neither of them are sleeping but both of them are pretending to. Bilbo doesn’t know if Thorin wants Bilbo to acknowledge him or not, so he says nothing, even when he continues talking, even when he reaches out, just once, and just gently, to brush a sweat-soaked curl from Bilbo’s brow.

“We thought you a creature of the dark, of bad tidings. We thought it was bad luck to catch sight of you between the trees. We saw the ash you spread around the trees and thought they were the residue of bonfires burnt to signal to creatures of other worlds. We thought you ate children. We thought you lived eternal.”

Bilbo can’t help but laugh at that. He is none of those things, but the last one strikes him as far and above the most ridiculous, for if there is one thing that he has always been aware of, it is the fragility of his own life.

Thorin stills, for a moment, as the illusion of sleep shatters, but reaches over again, the tips of his fingers skimming Bilbo’s cheek for just a moment.

“You are so much more than stories whispered in the dark,” he tells him, and something in Bilbo’s throat tightens, for that is all that he has ever been to the men outside the forest.

 

* * *

 

 

They do not speak much of what will happen when Thorin is freed – not in so many ways. Thorin will speak of how glad his family will be when they learn that he lives still, how much work he will have to catch up on after his unexpected holiday (as he has taken to calling it). He says how he will miss Bilbo's tea, the small and early blackberries they eat with honey with their fingers, the softness of Bilbo's sheets, worn and old but all the more comfortable for it. Bilbo doesn't want to talk about what it will be like when Thorin has gone, for he does not want to think about it: already in such a short time he has adjusted to company in the little cottage, and there is a strange coldness that he has grown accustomed to carrying which seems to have disappeared. 

He does not want it to come back.

“You could come to the village,” Thorin tells him, his voice low, quiet, as if he is afraid to speak these words but knows that he cannot avoid them any longer. “You could live with me, with your own kind again. They would understand that you are not what they think, and there you would be safe again, I could keep you safe-”

“I am safe here,” Bilbo interjects, shaking his head, for Thorin does not understand, and that frustrates him, but he knows that he cannot expect him to if he does not explain it to him in the best words that he has, and that frustrates him more. “And the villages of man will never be home to me. I am forest kin, woodland folk, man of the shadows. I am a witch – I am the hands of the Gods. This is where I belong.”

Thorin’s hand is on his, and Bilbo doesn’t remember how it got there, only that at some point in this quiet evening going over his parents’ old lore books it appeared, and there was no part of him that wished to shake it off.

“ _Can_ you leave?” Thorin asks, his frown growing even deeper. “Or are you bound to this place?”

Bilbo smiles, a small, strange thing.

“I can do as I wish,” is his reply as he stands. “But I wish to remain here. Where I am at home.”

He thinks that Thorin understands.

His eyes are kind, even if he does not.

“Promise me then,” he whispers, leaning closer. "That if you will not come within the protection of my village’s walls, that you will take the best care of yourself that you can out here, when you find an answer, when I return to my home? That you will not let any harm befall you, if you can help it?”

Bilbo nods, just once, as Thorin’s hand brushes his cheek.

 

* * *

 

 

But it is not a promise that he can keep.

He knows this, just as he knows that the promise of autumn is already kissing the sky. Midsummer had passed long before Thorin entered the wood, and now the nights are noticeably longer than they had been even a month ago. Bilbo can feel the time slipping away from him even as he desperately searches for a way to free Thorin from the forest, for a way to release himself from the bondage that he never, truly, meant to be ensnared in. He still does not regret it – how could he, when Thorin’s body is so warm sat beside him on the bench, when with each day he sleeps less, regains more colour, seems stronger and stronger and so flush with a vitality that is at odds with this dead month, with the dry earth and weeping trees.

But that came at a cost, and Bilbo still has not found a way to repay him, and the deadline for his debt is tomorrow. Then it will be September, then the clouds will break, then will life flourish once more before the winter comes.

“Blood for blood,” he mutters under his breath, and Thorin gives him a strange look.

There is only one answer, and he has known it for a very long time, even if he has never dared to say it out loud. It is a betrayal, in many ways, of the trust that the forest has given him, of the promise that he made Thorin, but he can see no other way. Desperately he has searched for alternatives, but the books have given him no answers, for there are none: life for a life. He knew that the moment he pressed his hands to Thorin’s wounds and chose to give him life. He forgot nothing, in that moment, nor when the God gave its ultimatum: what you take must be given back in turn, and if you bring something back from death, something else must be handed over to those cold hands.

Something of equal value.

“I know what to do,” he says, with a small smile that he works hard to seem real.

Thorin just watches him, perhaps sensing that something wrong, as Bilbo stands and reaches for the poppy seeds, to put in the burner. Good for deep sleeps. Sudden sleep. He has used it before, over the years, and knows that he will survive it for longer than Thorin will.

“Tell me,” Thorin says, and there is something discomforting in his voice that makes Bilbo believe that he is not hiding things as well as he should. The smell of the poppies is already seeping through the room, and Thorin is frowning a little as he breathes it in, as if he already knows that he does not feel quite right.

Perhaps this is the way that it always was going to go. The life of a beast might just be enough, if it was a strong and noble one, but it is not in Bilbo’s nature to take, only to give, and he abandoned that thought long ago. He chose Thorin over the forest and he will not choose to spill innocent blood to justify saving another: he knows that is a dangerous road to lead down, and one which he will never recover from, for he has heard the stories, whispered at his mother’s knee, about the forest folk who chose the ways of knives and death to save that which they love.

Those stories never ended well.

He smiles as Thorin, and leans forward, as he has wanted to do quite often.

The kiss that he presses against his mouth is quick, and dry, and makes something deep within his chest give with an ache that would alarm him if he didn’t know already that he was going to die tonight.

For a moment, Thorin presses back, his mouth impossibly warm against Bilbo’s, before he sags back into the chair.

“I want to thank you,” he whispers, as Thorin’s eyelids begin to droop, the soporific effect too sudden for him to fight. “For reminding me what it truly means to be living.”

He steps out quickly after that, for Thorin is already asleep: Bilbo is not certain if he will remember his words come morning, but he hopes that he does. The herbs should wear off after a few hours, and he will awake lucid, and he will not have to see any of what goes on this night.

The cat is waiting for him outside the doorway. She pads alongside him as he leaves the little house that he has always known, without a word, her tail brushing against his leg gently.

When the stag sees him, it seems to know, and turns, leading him into the darkness of the trees, away from the glade of his home, away from the brightest of the moonlight that is seeping through the leaves. Some things are better done in the dark: he knows this, but it does not make the short walk away from his house feel any better, even if he knows that were he to turn, he would still see the dim candlelight shining through the windows.

The cat makes a plaintive sound at his feet: he is grateful for her company, more than ever this night.

The stag stops; it turns; it regards them both with a coolness that could never be mistaken for anything living. When it opens its mouth, it reveals pointed teeth that have no place being in the mouth of a deer, and a wash of blood which falls from the depths of its maw stains its throat red.

“It is time,” it intones, and the mouth of the stag does not move, for it does not need to.

The God is more than that.

Bilbo nods, but before he can do anything else the cat swipes at his ankle, stinging, and he looks down into her bright eyes for just a moment before she darts away, quicker than Bilbo can catch, quicker than he can even yell aloud: one blink, and she is dead, impaled upon antlers harder than stone that fell with that same speed that he could not follow to catch her fall, one last embrace between beasts that were more than beasts.

He only finds his feet when she tumbles to the ground as the stag raises its head, and Bilbo has no fear of it now as he darts towards her. Her eyes are dimmer than they should be, he thinks frantically, realising too late that he left his herbs and stones at home, for he had had no plans for resurrection this night.

Her voice in his head, when it comes, it soft, and fading, and with a sudden breeze comes the scent of lilies.

 _My little love,_ it says, at once his mother’s voice and somehow more. _I only came to keep you from being lonely, and now you are not._

She dies, then, the cat that he has known for so many years, and the stag nods, once, at a transaction completed. This was not how this night was meant to go, and Bilbo can’t help but hate it, just for a moment, as it walks away, as if it always knew that this would happen.

The sound that tears from his throat, there on the dry earth, is more animal than human.

 

* * *

 

 

Bilbo sits, for a very long time, after that.

He isn’t sure how long, only that the dawn is pressing at the sky, and some hours must have passed, for Thorin is awake again.

He only becomes aware of Thorin’s presence when he feels the man brush against him, when he begins to speak, startling Bilbo out of his reverie, and he stands, almost automatically, at the sound, leaving the sad little bundle of something that had once been his friend on the ground. She had never liked being carried, after all, and what is left of her is already slowly dissolving into something somewhere between light and dust now that the dawn is touching her fur, reminding him, once more, that she had never been a thing of mortal flesh and blood, but something so much more.

A gift far more fitting to the Gods than the last of the forest-folk.

“You were going to let it take you, in exchange for me,” Thorin whispers, and though his voice is angry there is a stillness about him that Bilbo does not understand.

He says nothing, at first, for there is nothing to say to that, but this is not a comfortable quiet shared between them, and he is grieving, and everything hurts, and he knows that he needs to say something to break the silence that has stretched between them, brittle and sharp.

“You’re not wearing your knife,” Bilbo whispers, the best that he can manage, and he flinches when he looks down.

There is blood on his hands, and the smell of it is thick in his mouth.

Thorin shrugs, standing close enough to Bilbo that he can feel the movement of his shoulders.

“I do not know if I can trust the wood,” he admits, as he steps away from Bilbo, shaking his head. “But I do trust you. Even, if it seems, you do not extend me the same courtesy.”

Thorin turns, away from him, and he does not try to reach him, for in all his life he has never known a situation such as this.

He is hurt, but Bilbo does not know how to fix this injury.

 

* * *

 

 

There is no body to bury, but he visits his mother’s grave, even though he knows that she has long gone from the place, that only her bones remain beneath the soil and nothing of her is here. He tells her about the cat, anyway, and thanks her, as he has always meant to but never dared to, for sending her.

He says nothing about Thorin, but he feels as though she knows anyway, and would forgive him for the choice he had to make.  He sits there long into the night, after the full moon has risen to its peak in the sky.

If he cries, there is no one watching.

 

* * *

 

 

He takes Thorin home, the next day. He rarely dares to move this close to the edge of the forest, but he watches from the last line of trees as Thorin walks to the gate, and calls up to those above. The gate opens, and before it closes, he sees Thorin embraced by two young boys, his nephews, Bilbo would guess, and realises that he never asked Thorin what their names were. He watches until the gate is closed again, and then makes his way back into his forest, to the foothills of his mountains, to the beasts that wait for him. The air is still warm but there is something turning in the air, something that promises life again, and abundance, and the next stage in the ever moving cycle of the year.

He does not let himself think of the silence between them: nor the way that Thorin did not look back at him.

Above him, the clouds break, and the rain, when it reaches him, is cool.

This is his land, and his world, and there is always so much to do.

He does not grieve for Thorin’s absence, not that night, nor the night after. He could not have stayed in the little cottage with nothing to do, and he has a family of his own to care for, and Bilbo has learned long ago not to be selfish with that which he cannot keep for his own. It is quieter, around the house, with neither Thorin nor the cat to keep him company, but September brings many changes, and knows that idle hands make the day longer, so he rises early and does not return until after the sun has set: he burns lavender and chews on magnolia bark to ensure that his sleep is long, and that he doesn’t dream.

He isn’t sure if he is ready for dreams, not yet.

The world is turning, once more, to autumn, and he is ready for it: it will not be a warm September, not this year, and already he can taste the promise of frost when he breathes in deep. It will not be long before he wakes to find it decorating his windows. There is much to do before then: his own harvest needs to be reaped, from the vegetable plots that survived the dry August and the woods beyond it, which have their own gifts to be taken by his hands. They do not require so much of a sacrifice in turn: he will burn the leaves that will fall and cluster around the smallest saplings so they do not choke, will spread the ashes around the more vulnerable plants so that they might grow taller. That will be enough to appease the forest this time: no blood for this annual taking.

His fingers will be smeared with ash by the time he is done, and he will taste it in his mouth for days afterwards, but it will be less bitter than the blood that has been spilled here this year.

The animals too need their care: their movements become more reckless as they sense the cold coming, and there will be more injuries to care for, more creatures to ease to a different life. He does not feel any differently about doing that, despite Thorin, and sometimes he wonders if he should.

His house is quiet.

It takes him fifteen days to admit that it makes him feel alone.

And oh, how that hurts him, for he has never felt lonely before now: he does not know if he will ever see Thorin again, for they exchanged no promises, said nothing of what might happen next after Thorin’s enclosure ended. If perhaps Bilbo knew for certain that they never would, it might make things easier, but hope can be a terrible friend in the darkness of night, and Bilbo realises that he has never felt it before, not in this strange and visceral way. Certainty would mean closure, would let him return to the place and the life that had once been enough to leave him content at the end of the day, but he has learned what it is to have a body close to his in the night, to hear another breathing beside him, and he knows now that what his father often whispered is true.

_We must not let man into the forest, for they will destroy us._

He feels undone, simultaneously different and more like himself than he has ever been before: altered, to the core, but not to the point of unrecognizability. Just as the seasons transform the forest each year he realises that he too has been changed, though he did not think that such a thing would ever happen to him.

He remembers the way his parents danced, slowly, some summer nights, in the light of the moon, and how he would watch them from his bedroom window, eyes wide with pleasure at the sight of the forest magic weaving around them, recognising them, accepting them and their love as a part of the grand story that this world continues to weave, one year from the next.

He finds his first brown leaf, and tucks it into his belt.

Change, must always come.

He just didn’t expect it to come to him.

And then, barely a month after he turned his back on the village, he scrapes his hand on a particularly disgruntled ash and makes his way home early, only to find Thorin dragging a fallen bough from the forest to the woodpile within his boundary. He is dressed in much the same clothes as Bilbo had first found him, but he bears no bow, no blade at his waist. His shirt is open in deference to the sweat that he has worked up, and the scar tissue that Bilbo knows so well is already paler than it was the last time Bilbo had cause to look at it.

He doesn’t realise, until then, how much he has missed him, despite not having stopped thinking about him: the extent of his longing, he knows suddenly, was a well far deeper that he had not ventured to explore.

Thorin shoots him an easy smile over his shoulder as Bilbo approaches, lugging an oak branch over one shoulder. It will take Bilbo quite some time to chop these branches into something useable for the fire – but then again, if the way that Thorin is eyeing the old axe is any indication, he suspects that he might have some help on that front, as well.

“You came back,” he says, and it is a question, though he hasn’t got the inflection right, is still struggling a little to reconcile the sight in front of him with the cacophony in his mind that suddenly will not be quietened.

“I thought you might need some help before winter,” Thorin replied, casually. “I am sorry that it took me so long to return. The villagers did not believe my story – it took some time to convince them that I was not a spirit sent back to plague them, and to make them believe that I would come back again.”

He holds up his hand: the cut is there, the blood still dried around it. Bilbo can’t help but think how much it must have hurt, dragging the wood with his palm split like that, but he supposes that Thorin has survived worse before.

“You were angry at me, the last time we spoke,” he ventures, and Thorin nods, and then shrugs, and then begins to pull the wood again, towards the gate.

“I was,” he admits, with a small smile. “But then, we always are when those we care about put ourselves in danger and we are left helpless. It is an anger that fades, quickly enough.”

Bilbo nods, trying to hide the flash of hope that cuts through him more keenly than any of Thorin’s blades could have managed.

“How did you find your way back here?” Bilbo asks, pulling himself up to sit on the pile of wood that Thorin has already dragged from the forest. Thorin stops for a moment, wiping sweat from his brow, and then from within his pocket he pulls a familiar stone: one of Bilbo’s, though he had not noticed that it was missing, for he rarely had cause to use it.

“The cat told me to take it,” Thorin admits, worrying at his lip. “Whenever I held it, it was as if I could feel where you were, or at least the direction you were in. I followed that feeling.”

He extends his hand, as if to give it back to Bilbo, but he shakes his head, and with a gentleness that he did not know that he possessed he closes Thorin’s fingers back around the stone.

“It is not like you, to trust in feelings,” he whispers, and Thorin shrugs.

“I have learnt, perhaps, to have more faith in them.”

He is still proffering the stone, and Bilbo does not know if he wants to look at it or not just yet.

“I would rather you keep it,” he admits, though it is hard to do so. “It is a garnet, and it was my father’s, once. He used to use it to find my mother whenever he needed to speak with her. It… enhances the feelings of the heart, or so they say.”

Thorin’s eyes are shy, and it takes him a moment to look up at Bilbo again.

“I will keep it safe,” he promises, tucking it away again. “And should you be happy with me doing so, I will use it often.”

Bilbo is.

 

* * *

 

 

It is another full lunar cycle before Bilbo wakes to the sound of scratching at the door. He stumbles to it in darkness, not fully awake, and when he pulls it open he can see nothing, at first, for the moon has gone from the sky entirely. It is only when a paw swipes at his bare ankle that he looks down, realises, and gently bends to lift a small bundle of fur up to eye level.

The kitten has tall, pointed eyes and is a sandy colour: she is more wildcat than anything else, even at this young age, and her eyes have an iridescence that puts Bilbo in mind of jasper.

“Hello,” he whispers, as she knocks at his nose with her paw.

The kitten stares back at him, and for a brief moment he feels her stretching out her power, like the wind whispering through the trees.

He smiles, and brings her inside.

It will be some years before she is strong enough to send her thoughts to him, but he is happy to wait. He brings her through to his bedroom, depositing her on the bed where she curls immediately into the crook of Thorin’s knees, and he settles in too, the night dark beyond the window, the press of life in the air.

It will be a busy day tomorrow, he thinks, and his eyes slip closed.

But easier than it used to be, he is sure, now that he is not alone.


End file.
